History extols the bravery and enterprise of the pioneers, trapers, railroaders, miners and cowboys, but little has been written about the romance and legends of the Indian traders of the Southwest. Just when the first Indian trader began dealing with the Southwest Indians is uncertain. This is a book about trading posts. Old trading posts. Trading posts that are still operating and ones that are long gone without a trace, except perhaps a crumbling wall or foundation. The book describes the present condition of each post, examines its history, and provides directions to even the hard-to-find posts. Indian trading posts are rapidly becoming a thing of the past or, as some would say, have become a thing of the past. Although many still occupy the original buildings and some owners resist the complete modernization of their stores, few of today's so-called 'trading posts' bear any similarity to what a real working trading post was like -- Back cover.

On the sparsely settled Arizona reservation lands, trading posts were important centers for commerce as well as social gathering destinations. With a subsistence economy, the posts offered opportunities to trade sheep, wool, and crafts for necessities such as flour, coffee, sugar (known as "sweet-salt"), and tools. Most often, traders were Anglos, living as partners among their Indian neighbors. They often were the only contact with the outside culture, and their stores provided an outlet for local arts such as rugs, pottery, baskets, and jewelry. Traders helped with correspondence, transportation, and sickness, and they even buried the dead. Trading posts were the sites of marriages and murders; they were destinations for artists, scientists, and adventurous tourists. With the coming of roads and automobiles, trading posts have all but disappeared, but the stories and photographs shared in this volume offer a glimpse into a vanishing time in the Southwest.

Explorer's Great Destinations puts the guide back into guidebook. This Explorer's Great Destinations guidebook focuses on the Four Corners Region of the American Southwest, including parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah.

For the first time, a sweeping history of the Diné that is foregrounded in oral tradition. Authors Klara Kelley and Harris Francis share Diné history from pre-Columbian time to the present, using ethnographic interviews in which Navajo people reveal their oral histories on key events such as Athabaskan migrations, trading and trails, Diné clans, the Long Walk of 1864, and the struggle to keep their culture alive under colonizers who brought the railroad, coal mining, trading posts, and, finally, climate change. The early chapters, based on ceremonial origin stories, tell about Diné forebears. Next come the histories of Diné clans from late pre-Columbian to early post-Columbian times, and the coming together of the Diné as a sovereign people. Later chapters are based on histories of families, individuals, and communities, and tell how the Diné have struggled to keep their bond with the land under settler encroachment, relocation, loss of land-based self-sufficiency through the trading-post system, energy resource extraction, and climate change. Archaeological and documentary information supplements the oral histories, providing a comprehensive investigation of Navajo history and offering new insights into their twentieth-century relationships with Hispanic and Anglo settlers. For Diné readers, the book offers empowering histories and stories of Diné cultural sovereignty. “In short,” the authors say, “it may help you to know how you came to be where—and who—you are.”

This is the story of Billy Gene Malone and the end of an era. Malone lived almost his entire life on the Navajo Reservation working as an Indian trader; the last real indian trader to operate historis Hubbell Trading Post. In 2004 the National Park Service (NPS) launched an investigation targeting Malone, alleging a long list of crimes that literally equated him with the likes of Al Capone. A thought-provoking story of the dark side of a respected branch of the American government, The Case of the Indian Trader will open the eyes of a wide audience.

For more than a century, trading posts in the American Southwest tied the U.S. economy and culture to those of American Indian peoples—and in this capacity, Hubbell Trading Post, founded in 1878 in Ganado, Arizona, had no parallel. This book tells the story of the Hubbell family, its Navajo neighbors and clients, and what the changing relationship between them reveals about the history of Navajo trading. Drawing on extensive archival material and secondary literature, historian Erica Cottam begins with an account of John Lorenzo Hubbell, who was part Hispanic, part Anglo, and wholly brilliant and charismatic. She examines his trading practices and the strategies he used to meet the challenges of Navajo exchange customs and a seasonal trading cycle. Tracing the trading post’s affairs through the upheavals of the twentieth century, Cottam explores the growth of tourism, the development of Navajo weaving, the automobile’s advent, and the Hubbells’ relationship with the Fred Harvey Company. She also describes the Hubbell family’s role in providing Navajo and Hopi demonstrators for world’s fairs and other events and in supplying museums with Native artifacts. Acknowledging the criticism aimed at the Hubbell family for taking advantage of Navajo clients, Cottam shows the family’s strengths: their integrity as business operators and the warm friendships they developed with customers and with the artists, writers, archaeologists, politicians, and tourists attracted to Navajo country by its unparalleled landscapes and fascinating peoples. Cottam traces the preservation efforts of Hubbell’s daughter-in-law after the Great Depression and World War II fundamentally altered the trading post business, and concludes with the post’s transition to its present status as a National Park Service historic site.